The plaintiff, thenceforth, may control his actions, his words, his food, his sleep.

A cloud charged with lightning is forever suspended over his head, and no genius can devise the means to turn aside its bolts.

The cases, therefore, that result in freedom will ordinarily occupy sixfold or tenfold more time, besides requiring the exercise of more legal knowledge and ability, than those which terminate fatally to the respondent.

A mere barter of the holiest interests for worldly advantages!

It is the alleged slave who must be proved to be held to service before he can be constitutionally surrendered.

Next to honesty, this fear is the greatest protection to property, liberty, and life.

If any mortal should cultivate an abhorrence of slavery, the female sex should do it.

Those objects upon which all maternal affections meet and glow as in a focus, are torn from her bosom, like lambs from the flock when the shambles are empty.

When public men openly and notoriously practise vice, they make the vice public, and bring it within public jurisdiction.

In that day, the merchant, for the lucre of trade, shall not pay tribute in human beings, and send his flesh-tax across the free waters.

But on that ever-memorable day a senator of the United States, from Massachusetts, saw fit to trample under foot every thing that he had ever said in behalf of human freedom and against human bondage.

He went far, far out of his way, to fortify and extend the institution of slavery.

That every new concession we made to the south on the subject of slavery, for the sake of getting protection for our manufactures and other industrial interests, only impaired and postponed our chance of getting that protection.

All our substantial, industrious classes are above this temptation, and would spurn it if they were not above it.

Not every man engaged in manufactures or in commerce has yielded to the seductions of this tempter.

O, how these declarations contrast with what a manufacturer in a neighboring county is reported to have said,--that if he could work his mills any cheaper with slave labor than with free, he would employ slaves!

Every man who upholds this Fugitive Slave law acts them, whatever his language may be.

Even if this appeal were true, it would be one that no honorable man could hear without indignation.

The south must have their goods from somewhere, and our industrious artisans will make them, whoever the go-betweens may be.

As for that bugbear of a dissolution of the Union, I say, without fear of contradiction, that no practical man has ever believed in it for a day.

Show me one intelligent man in the whole country who has sold his stocks or his farm, or changed his residence, or altered his course of life in any respect, through fear that the Union was about to be dissolved.

Why, what would the English national debt be worth under any well-founded apprehension that the British monarchy was crumbling to pieces?

Confidence in the stability of our Union has not only pervaded this country, but other countries.

The great bankers abroad who deal in our stocks have never changed their terms one mill in a million of dollars, through any such idle fear.

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.